Tech Time Warp of the Week: William Shatner Materializes in Microworld, 1980

William Shatner says he knows nothing about technology.

“When it comes to technology, Star Trek-style or otherwise, I am, shall we say, challenged,” Shatner wrote in his breathtaking 2002 tomeI’m Working on That: A Trek From Science Fiction to Science Fact. “More to the point, I’m in the weeds…witless…an utter ignoramus.”

But if that’s true, the man is one brilliant actor.

Shatner didn’t just play Captan Kirk, a 23rd century star fleet commander intimately familiar with stuff like warp drives, phasers, tricorders, and little ear thingies that translate every alien language in the known universe. He was also our guide through the late-20th-century tech revolution, a pitchman who boldly went where no pitchman had gone before. In that great decade of the 1980s, he took us on a trip to a new-age digital mapping tool called GRASS. He guided the way to a “wonder computer” called the Commodore VIC-20. And — most notably and most amazingly — he opened the door to a sweeping tech utopia known as Microworld.

With the video below — a gem from the archives of tech giant AT&T — you can revisit Microworld, and once again, Shatner will be your guide, in all his tanned, toupee-ed, early-’80s glory.

Microworld is a mind-bending place where a modern “miracle” of a computer chip holds 7,000 transistors, a place controlled “by miniature electronic networks — networks so small their anatomy cannot be seen by the naked eye.” Shatner even shows you one of those chips. It glitters on the end of his index finger, while some sort of ’80s electro-music plays in the background.

"Why should you care how many transistors can be squeezed into tiny places you can’t see?"

— William Shatner

As the tour of Microworld continues, Bill takes you inside a super sterile clean room where bunny-suited technicians with Me Decade mustaches transform silicon wafers into dozens of glittering computer chips, each offering integrated microcircuits capable of “operating at speeds moving toward the speed of light.”

You question Shatner’s facts? You question the great man’s breathless delivery? Shame on you. Thirty-three years later, Dag Spicer, the curator of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, confirms that Shatner’s mellifluous description of Microworld is right on the money. “The beauty of the chip is that it converted a lot of the complexity of making transistors into a simple printing operation, almost like printing a t-shirt,” says Spicer. “We’re literally printing transistors. That’s what makes it so remarkable and scalable.”

What’s that you say? Seven thousand transistors is nothing? A modern day Nvidia graphics chip includes 7 billion transistors, one million times more than the one on the end of Shatner’s finger? That’s beside the point. Shatner ventured into Microworld in 1980. In 1980, seven thousand transistors was nothing less than awe inspiring — particularly when the words “seven thousand” emerge from the lips of Captain Kirk.

“Why should you care how many transistors can be squeezed into tiny places you can’t see?” Shatner asks, before answering his own question. You should care because it’s “one of the most significant ideas of our time. It will affect changes in what we do day to day in ways we’re only beginning to see and understand.” And he was dead right.

Transistors — originally developed at AT&T’s Bell Labs in the 1940s — revolutionized modern electronics and computers. They replaced bulky, energy-hungry vacuum tubes and made it possible to squeeze in more computing juice into ever smaller spaces, allowing computers to get smaller and faster. Eventually, the transistor not only gave rise to tiny computers like your Apple iPhone. It lead to the massive server farms that power worldwide web services such as Facebook and Google.

“Nature stores and transmits information in ways that make our present technologies seem primitive. Perhaps in that direction lies the next breakthrough,” he predicts, from inside Microworld. “They look to nature for the answer, for when they understood what nature was doing, they could control it.”

And with that, Shatner disappears into an AT&T Picturephone. We’re not quite sure how an obsolete video phone fits with the 1980 tech utopia that is Microworld. But who cares? It’s William Shatner.